But the guns began to thunder more loudly down at Bazeilles, and Jean bent his ear to listen.

“Where is the firing?”

“Faith,” replied Maurice, “it seems to me to be over toward the Meuse; but I’ll be hanged if I know where we are.”

“Look here, youngster,” said the corporal, “you are going to stick close by me to-day, for unless a man has his wits about him, don’t you see, he is likely to get in trouble.  Now, I have been there before, and can keep an eye out for both of us.”

The others of the squad, meantime, were growling angrily because they had nothing with which to warm their stomachs.  There was no possibility of kindling fires without dry wood in such weather as prevailed then, and so, at the very moment when they were about to go into battle, the inner man put in his claim for recognition, and would not be denied.  Hunger is not conducive to heroism; to those poor fellows eating was the great, the momentous question of life; how lovingly they watched the boiling pot on those red-letter days when the soup was rich and thick; how like children or savages they were in their wrath when rations were not forthcoming!

“No eat, no fight!” declared Chouteau.  “I’ll be blowed if I am going to risk my skin to-day!”

The radical was cropping out again in the great hulking house-painter, the orator of Belleville, the pothouse politician, who drowned what few correct ideas he picked up here and there in a nauseous mixture of ineffable folly and falsehood.

“Besides,” he went on, “what good was there in making fools of us as they have been doing all along, telling us that the Prussians were dying of hunger and disease, that they had not so much as a shirt to their back, and were tramping along the highways like ragged, filthy paupers!”

Loubet laughed the laugh of the Parisian gamin, who has experienced the various vicissitudes of life in the Halles.

“Oh, that’s all in my eye! it is we fellows who have been catching it right along; we are the poor devils whose leaky brogans and tattered toggery would make folks throw us a copper.  And then those great victories about which they made such a fuss!  What precious liars they must be, to tell us that old Bismarck had been made prisoner and that a German army had been driven over a quarry and dashed to pieces!  Oh yes, they fooled us in great shape.”

Pache and Lapoulle, who were standing near, shook their heads and clenched their fists ominously.  There were others, also, who made no attempt to conceal their anger, for the course of the newspapers in constantly printing bogus news had had most disastrous results; all confidence was destroyed, men had ceased to believe anything or anybody.  And so it was that in the soldiers, children of a larger growth, their bright dreams of other days had now been supplanted by exaggerated anticipations of misfortune.

“Pardi!” continued Chouteau, “the thing is accounted for easily enough, since our rulers have been selling us to the enemy right from the beginning.  You all know that it is so.”